PRO HART (1928-2006)
Uprising at Chinaman’’’’’’’’s Creek
oil on board
121.5 x 136 cm
PROVENANCE:
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 24 May 1973, lot 148
Private collection, Melbourne
Fine Australian & International Art, Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 13/03/2007, Lot No. 100
Private collection, Queensland
OTHER NOTES:
This work is accompanied by a letter and a photograph of the work signed by the artist

KEVIN CHARLES (PRO) HART (1928-2006)
Study for the Diggings
Oil on Board
121x121cm
Signed Lower Right, dated 73, Titled Lower Left Study for the Diggings
If ever there was a colourful and beloved Australian arts figure, Pro Hart was it. His name became a household word through the years of his heyday and lives on now in his vast body of uplifting and historic works, but also in the eponymous art gallery in his home town of Broken Hill. So well known is he as Pro
While Hart was never to reside other than in his adored Broken Hill, it was in Adelaide where he would find the springboard of his career. Art dealer and collector, Kym Bonython discovered Hart in the early 1960s and began exhibiting his works in his gallery in Jerningham Street, North Adelaide. Thus did Pro Hart become a founding figure of what was to become a movement of outback painters, sometimes known as Brushmen of the Bush.
Hart was a man of particularly outgoing and generous spirit and this shows clearly in the depth of paint and richness of colour he applied to many works. He was a multi-media artist in the literal sense. He worked oils and acrylics. He used techniques of scratching and Alla Prima, glazing, chiaroscuro and layering. He also loved sculpting.
Despite early aptitude and art tuition, he projected through his style a naif charm which worked as a beautiful counterpoint against some of the tough themes he depicted. As a narrative painter, he portrayed the rough and ready world of the outback, life on stations and, most emphatically, the world of the diggings of the early iron ore industry of Broken Hill. His most magnificent works were those of that world in which he had once worked, the world he knew as well as he knew his family, that world of rugged labouring men in the red-earth Australian bush, their shacks and tools and slag heaps, beneath a towering straggle of native trees and always under beautiful blue Southern skies.
Study for the Diggings happens to be a particularly striking and emblematic example of this classic Pro Hart style and theme and is considered to be among his major works.